Evolutionary
Psychology
According to most evolutionary psychologists, jealousy
was a necessary adaptation for the survival of our ancestors. Due to the different nature of problems that
men and women faced back then, different mechanisms
were adopted: he worried about her sleeping around, she
worried about him falling in love with someone else.

males do not differ in their responses, but
older women were more likely to choose
sexual infidelity as the worst kind of infidelity. These results suggest the evolutionary
theory might be right: older women who
don’t need a male partner to look after their
kids anymore, care more about sexual infidelity. “The truth is that we simply did not
know how the results would turn out,” lead
author Todd Shackleford explains. “Once the
results were in, we offered post-hoc speculations. Previous work inspired by an evolutionary perspective indicates that younger
women are more upset by emotional than
sexual infidelity, and this was predicted before the results were in. The prediction was
based on the fact that ancestral women
faced more sever reproductive costs with
a partner’s emotional infidelity—diverting

resources, time, and attention to another
women and her children—leaving less for
the woman’s own children with her partner.
Because much older women do not have dependent children , we speculate that they
are therefore less upset by a partner’s emotional infidelity and, by default, more upset
by a partner’s sexual infidelity.”

David Buss, one of the leading experts in this than women, become upset when they see
field, conducted cross-cultural research to
examine male and female attitudes towards
sexual and emotional infidelity. In one of
his most well-known studies, participants
were confronted with two scenarios: one in
which their partner was in love with someone else, and one in which their partner had
sex with someone else. Subjects had to pick
the most distressing scenario. The majority
of women surveyed in the United States, the
Netherlands, Germany, Japan, Korea, and
Zimbabwe, experienced emotional infidelity as more upsetting. The majority of men,
however, found the prospect of a partner’s
sexual infidelity more agonizing.

a sexual infidelity, because it’s the sex act
that compromises their paternity certainty.
From a woman’s perspective, it doesn’t compromise her maternity certainty if her husband has sex with someone else; she’s still
one hundred percent sure she’s the mother
of her child. However, it could be extraordinary damaging for her, because she risks the
diversion of her man’s attention, resources
and commitment. One of the cardinal cues
to that long time diversion of resources, is
the man becoming emotionally involved
with another woman. So women tend to be
more upset by the emotional aspects of infidelity.”

Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe
According to Buss, these different attitudes
are the consequence of the evolutionary
challenges our ancestors were faced with.
“Both sexes are equally jealous, but they differ in the psychological design of their jealousy,” Buss explains. “Men, far more likely

Age difference
Another interesting study conducted by a
group of psychologists examined the difference in responses between the sexes and
between a young group with mean age of
20 and an old group with a mean age of 67.
The study points out that younger and older

Should we be jealous - evolutionary psychology

was a necessary adaptation for the survival of our ancestors. Due to the different nature of problems that men and women faced back then, different mechanisms were adopted: he worried about her sleeping around, she worried about him falling in love with someone